A veteran Dundee councillor has called for urgent action to improve a council-run emergency service after inspectors discovered it is not getting to vulnerable people quickly enough.
The social care response team (SCRS) has 3,000 users during the day and 6,000 overnight. It has mobile units which travel all over the city in response to alerts, including elderly people who have fallen or have suffered some other serious problem and need help.
However, the Care Inspectorate has given the service a “weak” rating for the quality of its care after finding it was sometimes taking more than six times as long as it should to send staff to someone’s home.
Independent councillor Ian Borthwick, who spent many years working for Age Concern, said: “These are elderly and vulnerable people and it is absolutely crucial that we give them maximum support to live in their own homes.
“Remedial action must be taken without delay to address the issues raised in this report.”
Gordon Samson, of the Dundee Pensioners’ Forum, described the inspectorate’s findings as alarming.
He said: “Our members report to us that these failures are real and they are getting more and more regular.”
One SCRS worker told the Care Inspectorate: “I feel we provide a great service but due to lack of resources, service users are having to wait too long at times for a response due to volume of calls.”
Another warned: “People are feeling overwhelmed”.
The inspectorate took a closer look at response times and found the service often failed to meet its own 20-minute target. One day 48 calls out of 80 took longer than 20 minutes and on another it was 34 calls out of 67.
On one occasion it took more than a hour to attend a “no response” call, when staff had been unable to speak to someone after the alarm had been raised. Staff found the person had fallen and needed help to get up.
Another call for help with personal care took staff more than two hours to get to. During that time, the inspectorate said, the person’s dignity had been extremely compromised.
There had also been occasions when too few mobile units were on duty.
The inspectorate has ordered the city council to ensure it has enough staff available at all times and have clear contingency procedures for them to follow when mobile units cannot attend a call within satisfactory timescales.
Social work director Jenni Tocher will present a report to councillors next week explaining how she intends to respond to the Care Inspectorate’s demand for improvements.
She said: “The number of service users has grown exponentially in the past two years in line with the Scottish Government’s ‘shifting the balance of care’ agenda, which promotes the support of individuals to remain in their own home.
“The increasing frailty of these individuals has resulted in the response visits taking longer and this has a knock-on effect to the overall response times.”
Training for control room began last month and a rolling programme will target new staff than provide refresher training for the others.
A document on contingency arrangements has also been drawn up to guide staff.
Ms Tocher added: “To minimise delays in reaching service users, mobile units have been deployed to east and west areas during both day and night shifts.”
Councillor Ken Lynn, convener of the social work and health committee, said staff vacancies had now been filled.
“I’m hoping that will mean this won’t happen again.
“I think there was genuine shock at the report. This is a wake-up call for the department and there’s going to be much closer monitoring of response times in the future.”